Ballot Question 300 would ban fracking in Longmont

By Scott RochatLongmont Times-Call

Posted:
10/06/2012 08:26:48 PM MDT

Updated:
10/15/2012 08:36:32 AM MDT

LONGMONT -- Few words in Longmont hold more contention than "fracking."

The word has crowded council chambers and heated up arguments. It's inspired petitions, presentations, even protest songs. It's starting to inspire rallies and ad campaigns, for and against an absolute ban of the drilling practice.

But the real question is still weeks away from an answer. Can fracking draw votes? And on which side?

On Nov. 6, Ballot Question 300 goes to the voters. If it passes, the city charter would require a Longmont-wide ban of fracking -- more formally, hydraulic fracturing, a means of using high-pressure fluid to break open deeply buried and hard-to-get deposits of oil and gas -- as well as banning the storage of fracking waste in town.

And depending on whom you ask, the measure will either save Longmont from irreparable environmental damage or doom it to an endless round of reparations and expensive lawsuits.

"The city could be on the hook for millions, if not tens of millions," said Bill Ray, a spokesman for the group Main Street Longmont, which has begun advertising against the measure, including a television ad and the endorsement of seven former mayors. "(The supporters) never thought about the consequences, or if they thought about it, they never worried about the consequences."

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"Are you content with an operation next to your home or your children's school that is said to be safe, but hasn't been shown to be safe?" asked Michael Bellmont of Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont, which put the measure on the ballot after a petition drive that gathered more than 8,200 signatures. (City officials validated 6,609.) "In almost any other area of public health, do we do it in that order?"

Hazard or hysteria?

The petition for Question 300 was turned in just three days after the City Council approved a new set of oil and gas regulations, meant to keep drilling out of residential areas. The state criticized the rules as unnecessary and eventually sued the city, while Our Longmont said the rules didn't go nearly far enough. ("They're not prohibitions, they're suggestions," Bellmont said.)

One key issue has been just how safe or unsafe fracking really is. A frequently invoked name early on was Pavilion, Wyo., where a preliminary Environmental Protection Agency report said in December that fracking likely had contaminated groundwater in the area. Opponents of fracking cited the tests as proof of their concerns; industry backers said the contamination was because the monitoring wells had been drilled in a natural gas reservoir, and that fracking occurs far below any water supplies that could be affected.

Ray called the fears groundless, built more on emotion than logic.

"There's been thousands of water wells tested in Colorado, hundreds of oil and gas wells, and no examples of contamination from fracking," Ray said. "There's been a lot of fear-mongering."

A study from the University of Texas at Austin's Energy Institute also concluded that "migration" of fracking fluids into aquifers hadn't been adequately proven, though it also noted that in many states, the drilling regulations could stand to be updated for better monitoring and protection.

Longmont has had some high-profile contamination. In 2006, groundwater testing near the Rider Well No. 1, near Trail Ridge Middle School, was found to have nearly 100 times the state-allowed level of benzene. That, however, didn't come from fracking, but from a leaking waste pit. As part of a deal between the city and the well's owner, TOP Operating, TOP will shut down the well and the city will buy the land.

While Bellmont doesn't ignore water -- too much, he said, is used in the fracking process and taken out of the water cycle -- he said his true concern was air pollution related to fracking. The town of Erie put a moratorium on drilling permits after a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study found Erie had 10 times more propane in its air than Los Angeles -- an "accidental study," Bellmont said, since it hadn't originally set out to measure volatile organics at all.

So far, he said, there hasn't been a state-backed study to study the emissions from fracking.

"Would people take a drug untested by the FDA?" Bellmont asked

Rights and wrongs

Part of the challenge is that in Colorado, mineral rights can be split off from surface rights, a situation Gov. John Hickenlooper acknowledged is less than ideal.

"In Colorado, if we were to start from scratch, I wouldn't want the split estate system we have," he said during a Sept. 19 appearance in Longmont. "It creates a difficulty in terms of establishing 'What is someone's property right?'"Since the mineral right is a property right, Ray said, the situation is clear. Fracking is used in about 90 percent of oil and gas wells, he said, so banning the practice is equal to denying someone the right to claim the minerals they own. "Their property right has been taken away, and you can't do that without compensating the entity," Ray said. "Colorado law is the only thing we can go on and Colorado law says the mineral rights owner has the right to those minerals ... Ballot Question 300 doesn't get to rewrite it."

That gets expensive, he said, either in paying for the "taking" or in fighting the lawsuits that may follow from operators, royalty holders and state officials.

Bellmont said that with modern directional and horizontal drilling, which can stretch "sideways" beneath the ground to reach deposits thousands of feet away, a driller doesn't even need to be in the city to claim their rights. And while lawsuits may carry a cost, he said, so would thousands of truck trips to service a well site.

"You can't tell me we're not going to be rebuilding and rehabilitating miles of road," Bellmont said. "If it takes $300,000 to fight a lawsuit to protect our children's health for the next generation in this fabulous town, let it be spent here, and not on the health impact, the infrastructure impact and the emergency responses."

Ray said he had nothing against regulation. Colorado has some of the toughest in the nation, he said, a statement that has been repeated by state officials and many in the industry. But banning a legal operation from the city limits will produce nothing but headaches, he said.

"They don't have the right to drive it out of town," he said. "It's not their decision to make."

Facing off

With such a high-profile issue, the election has the potential to draw serious dollars. Longmont set a campaign finance record last year when opponents of a city fiber-optic initiative spent $419,629 in the campaign, a fight they lost. The first reports for this election don't come out until next week and each side charges the other with having large-scale backing -- either the oil and gas industry or national anti-fracking environmentalist groups, as appropriate.

"There's a lot of emotion," Ray said. "It does take substantial resources to communicate with the voters and take some of the emotion out of the conversation. ... There's been a lot of fear-mongering."

"The state, the oil and gas companies, the former mayors are all saying that it's right to have heavy industrial operations next to your house or your children's school, and if you don't let us, we'll sue you until you do so," Bellmont responded. "Now who's the fear monger?" Scott Rochat can be reached at 303-684-5220 or srochat@times-call.com.